Let the Harvesting Begin

Things are really starting to come in.  Some things like our pole beans are already finished. I was able to put up 13 quarts for the winter in addition to eating multiple meals with fresh cooked green beans.

Garlic was harvested, dried and has already been used in a multitude of dishes. 

Onions were successful this year but as usual, not expected to be all that we will need.  These will go in salsa, spaghetti sauce, soups and in a variety of other dishes.  Guaranteed we will run out but oh well we get what we can out of the garden.

Brussels sprouts.  The experiment this year has been successful as far as production but we decided we probably won't grow these again.  We fought with cabbage worms and harlequin beetles the entire time they were in the garden.  We are eating them in a variety of dishes and blanched and froze some for future use.

Butternut squash was the bumper crop this year.  We decided to trellis them this time as they can take up acreage on the ground if you let them.  They also need to watched carefully if they are on the ground so that bugs don't bore into them and ruin them.  I will always grow these on a trellis in the future.  We got 18 squash out of  5 plants and 18 butternut is a whole lotta butternut. I will can some cubes because they make great "pumpkin" pie and soufflés.  I will use some in ravioli and some will just be cooked and roasted as a side veggie.

Potatoes were good as usual this year. We changed their location in the yard this year and did not have any issue with potato bugs which made them very hands off this year.  This was good because they were planted deep as a method to not have to hill them up and therefore they were more difficult to harvest as we had to go so deep for them and the soil was rather hard to dig thru.  In the end we decided it was worth it though as we virtually never touched them after we planted them and got a large yield for our efforts. We have 4 varieties that we harvested:  Kennebec's which are a good white storage potato, some small red fingerlings which we probably won't plant again as the yield is not much for the space they took up, red new potatoes which are a staple for most people and some blue potatoes that are very nice and will most likely be planted again.  

Ginger was given to us this year by a co-worker.  It is happily growing under the deck in a hanging basket. It is pretty and might be pretty much ornamental as we don't use a lot of ginger.

Cucumber were easy as usual this year.  We have about 18 quarts of pickles put up which is a lot of pickles for us. We tend to give some of these away to a friend who loves them so they will all be consumed.   They are also slowing down in production but we are still getting plenty for cucumber tomato salads. We also experimented with some squash pickles which are really good. 

Tomatoes are just now starting to come in in abundance.  My counters will be red from here on out for the remainder of the summer.  Sharee has already canned some tomato sauce with us and pulled her canner out of storage.  She has a little bit bigger canner than I have and it has the capabilities of canning 18 pints at a time which will be handy this year. I canned some salsa last night and will have something tomato going pretty much from here on out.

Peaches have been frozen for smoothies and we have eaten them daily now for almost a month.  We will be sad when these are gone for the season. 

Boy don't we love summertime fresh.